Boris Johnson: A bigger Heathrow will turn London into a living hell

Only a hub airport out east can resolve both the capital’s aviation dilemmas and safeguard its citizens’ wellbeing

Tuesday 17 December 2013 12:04 BST

The choice is clear, and stark. We have come to a turning-point in the development of the city, and future generations of Londoners will either curse us for getting it wrong — or bless us for having the courage and the foresight to do the right thing now.

We can either go on expanding Heathrow, turning many parts of London into an intensifying hell of aircraft noise; or else we can look again at the main alternative, a 24-hour hub airport to the east of the city, built to the highest environmental standards, delivering hundreds of thousands of jobs, and with enough space to allow Britain truly to compete with our rivals on the Continent and around the world.

When the two cases are fairly considered I believe the answer is obvious, and that this new airport cries out to be built.

It is no solution to build another runway at Gatwick. As long as Heathrow is the hub, Heathrow is where the airlines will want to go — and yet it would be an unforgiveable mistake to build more runways in the west London suburbs.

In the first option proposed by Sir Howard Davies — the Harmondsworth runway — you would need a full realignment of the M4/M25 junction and at the very least you would need to tunnelise the M25 — six lanes in each direction — for about one kilometre.

In the more ambitious variant, the “Heathrow hub”, you would need a much longer tunnel and to realign the A 3113 and junction 14. You would also have to bury or somehow protect a reservoir that supplies much of our drinking water.

We are talking about schemes that would probably involve closing the M25 for five years, just for starters. These projects are not easy, they are not quick, and they certainly aren’t cheap.

The full bill for transport infrastructure — just for one new runway — would run into tens of billions. It would take well over 15 years to complete: we are looking at 2030 before anyone could hope to take off from the new runway.

And what would we have achieved? We would simply worsen the problem of aircraft noise pollution that already afflicts 766,000 people in this city — and bear in mind that Heathrow is already noisier than its five main European rivals put together.

We would be subjecting whole new communities (yes, it could be you) to noise pollution for the first time. According to a recent study by Imperial there are already 102,000 Londoners who are 20 per cent more likely to suffer heart attack or stroke as a result of the existing noise.

It seems insane to do this to London — to worsen the quality of life for so many millions of people when every other policy is designed to reduce pollution of all kinds.

But that is not the worst aspect of the Heathrow option. The real trouble is that as soon as the new runway was built, it would be full; and demand for a fourth would be insatiable.

Many pro-Heathrow lobbyists like to pretend this is not true. We only want a third runway, they say. That is the limit of our territorial demands, they wheedle; and they pretend (inconsistently) that hub airports are going out of fashion, and that future demand will be satisfied by other airports.

They know this is false. It flies in the face of the evidence from the rest of the world. Look at Turkey, India, China, the Middle East: they are building hub airports with four, five or six runways — or even more. Across Europe, our competitors have the space they need, and over the past 10 years they have been ruthlessly winning business from Britain.

If we expand Heathrow now, we will be consigning future generations not just to the misery of noise pollution but to the frustration and tedium of having the same argument over and over again — and with the wrong option becoming ever more disastrously entrenched.

That is why we must do the right thing now. The estuary option solves so many problems at once. We would achieve a renaissance in both east and west London.

At Heathrow, we would have a new borough for London, an area the size of Kensington and Chelsea, with four Tube stations, Crossrail and the Heathrow Express. In a city desperate for housing, there would be scope for tens of thousands of new homes together with hi-tech industry and a new university.

In the east, you would have the space to let planes take off and land with minimal disruption to human beings — or indeed any living things. You would create about 375,000 jobs in the region of the airport alone, and about 135,000 in the corridor to London.

The overall boost to UK GDP would be about £650 billion. TfL is absolutely confident that we would be able to move passengers from the airport to Canary Wharf in 15 minutes, to London Bridge in 20 minutes and Waterloo in 23 minutes.

That compares well with the Heathrow Express, never mind the Piccadilly line. We believe the costs for transport infrastructure would be £20 billion to £25 billion — not much more than Heathrow is currently proposing for one runway.

The airport itself would cost about £30 billion, most of which could be readily financed by international investors.

And you could do it in roughly the same timescale as is now being proposed for a third runway at Heathrow.

This is the only option that takes account of the future needs of the city. It is deliverable, it is cost-effective, and it will allow Britain to compete in the global race. If we win this argument, the prize is immense — and we spare millions of Londoners the misery of aircraft noise pollution.